On 7 September 2026 The Land featured an article “Commercial advantage: the old cattle breed making a quiet comeback” about the British White Cattle breed in Australia. Members with a digital subscription to any of the ACM Agri mastheads (The Land, QCL, Stock and Land etc) can access the article on line. The article by Jessica Owers is gratefully reproduced here for the benefit of members and our newsletter subscribers
Katie Jagger of Lallylee British White Stud, Foxground, has been breeding British White cattle since 2021. Picture by Jessica Owers.
“In the rainfall-rich district of Foxground, on the state’s south coast, Katie Jagger’s herd of British White cattle has grown fourfold in five years.
From just nine individuals, bought from the Mid North Coast during COVID, to nearly 35 today, the herd is a small but necessary contribution to Australia’s British White population, 784 at last count.
“I recently had someone buy three from me as a starter herd in the Southern Highlands,” Ms Jagger said.
“I’m hoping that might happen more because they are beautiful cattle.”
The British White, one of the oldest native breeds to the United Kingdom, was first introduced to Australia in 1958, and today the herd numbers 688 females and 96 bulls.
A ‘heritage breed’, albeit also classed a ‘rare breed’ with Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, they are robust cattle and, according to Ms Jagger, surprisingly suited to Australian conditions.
“Their colouring is really beneficial because they don’t get too hot, but they also have the dark skin underneath, which I’ve found makes them resistant to sunburn and skin cancers,” she said.
“For me, that’s something to be noted because I know of several cows in this valley recently lost to skin cancers.”
British Whites are known for their white coat and distinctive black points on the muzzle, nose, ears, eye areas and legs, with a black tongue preferred. They have good docility, bred for temperament and a low birth weight, with strong maternal characteristics.
In Australia, their numbers have suffered from commercial apathy, something the British White Cattle Society of Australia, and its president John Miller, are trying to counter.
“There are people who have them because they love them, and people who have them because they’re a rare breed, but we need to grow the breed commercially,” Mr Miller said.
“We need to get more people interested in them as a commercial option, as opposed to your hobby-type cattle, and we know they will never sell as well as Angus, but nothing sells as well as Angus these days.”
Current Angus data in Australia presents a compelling picture for Angus, and the opposite for breeds trying to cut into its market.
Angus genetics influence up to 53 per cent of the total Australian beef herd, while pure Angus accounts for about 38pc of the national purebred share.
Of the total Australian bull population, 71pc is pure or predominantly Angus.
Mr Miller, who farms 45 British White females west of Grafton, said while he didn’t expect the breed to ever compete with Angus, he also didn’t see why it shouldn’t.
“British Whites are very good doing cattle, very well-tempered and fertile, and have all the attributes to be commercial,” he said.
“We appreciate they’re a heritage breed with a very old genetic line, but we want people to have them because they will give you commercial performance.”
In her 2025 book, Saving Heritage Breeds: A Love Story, author and University of Western Australia adjunct research fellow Catie Gressier observed the consequences of a livestock industry honed in on high-yield breeds.
She found the extinction rate alarming, stating unique breeds had vanished at the rate of one a month for more than three decades. At least 184 breeds, or close to 10pc of livestock breeds globally, were now extinct, and in Australia, 12 cattle breeds had disappeared.
Judy Barnet, managing director of Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, said maintaining genetic diversity by keeping rare breeds created future options for Australian agriculture.
She said British White cattle were a perfect example of why rare breeds mattered, and why their traits – natural polling, docility, easy calving and hardiness – were more important than just history.
“The difficulty is that a British White breeder doesn’t have the same enormous established market that an Angus breeder has,” Ms Barnet said.
“If you are making a purely commercial decision today, it can be very difficult to justify maintaining a small rare breed when a mainstream breed may offer an easier and more immediate financial return.
“But if everyone makes that same decision, eventually the British White disappears, and with it we lose those genetics forever, and we can’t wait until agriculture needs a particular trait and then decide we should have conserved the breed that carried it.”
For Mr Miller, the challenge was keeping the British White relevant, with the ultimate target the saleyards, which could only happen with commercial numbers.
He said abattoirs weren’t interested in small orders, which left the breed in the ‘paddock-to-plate’ or service kill category, with only a few mobile butchers servicing breeders.
“We’ve seen it in Victoria where the cattle are having to go longer and longer distances for butchering,” Mr Miller said.
“There is some real work getting done in Victoria to get farm accreditation for butchering, and NSW is falling behind, but it’s a legislative minefield.
“The sort of testing you have to do works on high volumes, not on small volumes, which makes it very difficult to butcher those small groups of animals, and when it comes to the meat works, they don’t want you bringing in two or three animals; they want you bringing in a B-double.”
At Foxground, Ms Jagger isn’t breeding for the meat works. She said she was potentially interested in using her British White herd for hybrid vigour.
“They actually perform really well in that space,” she said.
“When you cross an Angus with a British White, or a British White with a dairy breed, together they can perform almost better than the individual, and I’ve had a little trial of that and already my calves are almost bigger than some of their mums.”
This was an avenue Mr Miller said was quite popular with breeders.
“We’ve had some success with this, encouraging people to use their British White bulls with dairy herds to get some better attributes into a fairly slim genetic line in the dairy herd,” he said.
“If you’re prepared to step back a bit from conventional cattle and get animals that do well, are well-tempered and easy to work with, the British Whites are a magnificent animal for that.”
